As computers have evolved, a variety of data entry techniques have been developed to enhance the user's experience and to make computers more versatile. For example, typical computer systems, especially computer systems using graphical user interfaces (GUI) for user interaction, such as the Microsoft WINDOWS® brand operating system, are optimized for accepting user input from one or more discrete input devices. Thus, a computer user may enter text with a keyboard, and control the position of a pointer on a display screen with a pointing device, such as a mouse, having one or more buttons for activating user selections associated with the location of the pointer. Some computing systems even have expanded the input systems available to a user by providing a pen-like stylus that can be used as a multipurpose data input device.
For example, the Microsoft WINDOWS® brand XP Tablet PC Edition operating system provides a data entry user interface, referred to as the Tablet PC Input Panel, text input panel, or TIP, through which a user can employ a pen or stylus to submit data into a computer. This type of user interface falls into the broader category of a data entry graphical user interfaces, which may be generically referred to as data input panels. A data input panel may provide a writing surface, which converts movement of the stylus across the surface into electronic ink. Some versions of the data input panel can then translate the electronic ink into text, while other types of data input panels can alternately or additionally provide the electronic ink directly to an application running on the computer. A data input panel may also provide a “soft” keyboard surface that displays the characters of a conventional keyboard. If the user employs a stylus to tap on a displayed key, then the computer will receive the character associated with that key as input data.
While the data input panel substantially increases the usefulness of a computer, there are still some inconveniences associated with conventional data input panels. First, many computer users are unfamiliar with data input panels. Thus, a developer creating a software application cannot be certain that a user will know how to manually summon a data input panel to enter data into the application. Instead, the developer must hope that the user will be able to activate and use the data input panel or have an alternate data input method available.
Also, because the data input panel is a graphical user interface, it is typically displayed simultaneously with the application into which the data from the data input panel will be entered. To avoid having the data input panel actually obscure the location into which the data will be entered, the data input panel is usually “docked” below the application. While positioning the data input panel in this fashion ensures that it will not prevent the user from viewing the destination location for the data, it is sometimes inconvenient for the user to continuously move the stylus back-and-forth between the application (to control the application) and the data input panel (to enter data into the application).
Further, because of the variety of data input techniques offered by a typical data input panel, it is often inconvenient for a user to determine which technique is the most appropriate for entering data into a particular location in an application. For example, an application may contain an edit control for receiving a case-sensitive password. If, however, the user attempts to enter a password into the edit control by writing on a writing surface provided by a data input panel, the user's handwriting may be incorrectly recognized. Further, if the edit control does not display the incorrectly recognized handwriting but rather intentionally hides the incorrectly recognized text, the user may not even realize why his or her password is not being accepted. In this situation, it might be preferable for the user to instead enter data into the edit control using a soft keyboard rather than the writing surface, but the user must realize that the soft keyboard surface is more appropriate for the task and change the data input panel to that display surface himself.